the next, until Senator Ted Cruz reached the end of his tether over their nonstop insults: “The questions asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. . . . You look at the questions. Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here? Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?” The audience roared its approval. The CNBC crew returned to Washington, D.C., and New York thoroughly humiliated, a case study on how to completely screw up a national debate.
CBS’s Face the Nation brought on Slate writer Jamelle Bouie to smear Trump voters as racist: “Trump’s supporters show all the hallmarks of people with high levels of racial resentment. They are—you know, they seem—a good number believe that President Obama is un-American or maybe even a Muslim and connected to terrorists. A good number referred to him as arrogant and elitist which, for myself, reads very much like ‘uppity’ as an old insult towards African Americans who have achieved some sort of stature in mainstream society.”
PBS host Tavis Smiley threw the race card with more velocity on ABC’s This Week: “Trump is still, to my mind at least, an unrepentant, irascible, religious and racial arsonist,” he screamed. “And so, when we talk about how Trump is rising in the polls, you can’t do that absent the kind of campaign he’s running, the issues he’s raising.”
As Trump’s chances of winning the nomination grew, the historical analogies grew more ridiculous—and offensive. On February 26, the Washington Post editorial board decided to compare Trump’s proposed crackdown on illegal immigration to murderers of millions: “He would round up and deport 11 million people, a forced movement on a scale not attempted since Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot. . . . He routinely trades in wild falsehoods and doubles down when his lies are exposed.” The Post’s editorial writers repeated this Pol Pot slur (equating deportation and execution) on April 22: “Remember that Mr. Trump promised to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them, in what would be the largest forced population movement since Pol Pot’s genocide of the Cambodian people.”
CNN commentator Sally Kohn lit some warning flares of her own. Even if you couldn’t vote for Hillary, “the woman who’s running with the impeccable and vast record of experience, if that’s not enough for people, at least stopping us from being Nazi Germany would hopefully get Democrats and others to turn out.” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota left the Nazi smear unchallenged. Three days later on CNN, Kohn drove the hyperbole into Fantasyland. She worried: “When he [Trump] institutes internment camps and suspends habeas, we’ll all look back and feel pretty bad.”
The Nazi smears were all the rage for the outraged. New York Times columnist David Brooks cracked on Meet the Press: “If we’re going to get Trump, we might as well get the Nuremberg rallies to go with it!”
George Stephanopoulos threw Hitler at Trump on Good Morning America. “The number of prominent people comparing you to Adolf Hitler is actually growing by the day. . . . I can’t remember that kind of comparison being used against any other presidential candidate. Does it suggest to you that you should tone down your rhetoric and your tactics?”
CNN host Erin Burnett badgered Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott. “The current president of Mexico—two former presidents of Mexico—have compared him to Hitler,” she said. “Vicente Fox, former president, specifically said, ‘He reminds me of Hitler.’ It’s direct. It’s not an allusion. It’s a direct thing. ‘He reminds me of Hitler.’ Do they have a point?”
By March 15, Trump had won nineteen of the first twenty-nine state primaries or caucuses and his opponents were dropping like flies. Jeb Bush had spent $100 million fruitlessly. Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul were also gone. So too were Jim Gilmore, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry. All that remained were John Kasich and Ted Cruz, his most serious challenger.
By May 13, as Trump closed in on the nomination, NPR’s On the Media host Bob Garfield lost control of his metaphors and, for a moment, his mind. Trump’s “supposedly courageous candor is contaminated with the most cowardly hate speech—racism, xenophobia, misogyny, incitement, breathtaking ignorance on issues, both foreign and domestic, and a nuclear recklessness, reminiscent of a raving meth-head with a machete on an episode of Cops.”
Trump was no longer a joke. He was a threat, and once the leftists convinced themselves Trump was a national menace, it wasn’t long before some of them started talking up violence. The Huffington Post published an article by Jesse Benn on June 6, 2016, headlined “Sorry, Liberals, a Violent Response to Trump Is as Logical as Any.” Benn argued: “In the face of media, politicians, and GOP primary voters normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate—whatever your personal beliefs regarding violent resistance—there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this.”
Benn wasn’t kidding. After a radical leftist gunned down Congressman Steve Scalise and several others in June 2017, Benn tweeted the shooter some advice: “For violent resistance to work, it’d need to be organized. Individual acts can be understandable, but likely counterproductive/ineffective.”
Then there was the army of amateur psychiatrists. On June 8, 2016, CBS contributor Nancy Giles insisted to MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell that Trump was “clinically insane.” O’Donnell agreed. “You’re not alone,” he responded. “There’s a lot of clinicians who have been speculating about that.” Unsurprisingly for O’Donnell, he didn’t produce a single name.
New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the paper, loathed Trump’s proposed travel ban from Muslim countries that support terrorism. “Let’s be absolutely clear,” he lectured. “This is not just about bigotry. The mass arrest and forced movement of large populations has been an instrument of genocide throughout history. That is how the Turks committed genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century, how the United States government decimated some Native American tribes and how Stalin killed millions of his own citizens.”
In a July 12, 2016, interview with Rolling Stone magazine, which is not a place you should go for journalistic integrity and truth telling, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow saw the Führer in Trump’s eyes. “What’s the worst-case scenario for America if he [Donald Trump] wins? It can be pretty bad. You don’t have to go back far in history to get to almost apocalyptic scenarios. . . . Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor. I am gravitating toward moments in history for subliminal reference in terms of cultures that have unexpectedly veered into dark places, because I think that’s possibly where we are.”
Legendary Washington Post reporter turned crackpot Carl Bernstein kept dropping the political F-word on Trump, as in this CNN interview snippet on October 21, 2016: “This campaign is now about a neo-fascist—I keep coming back to that—sociopath. . . . He is setting himself up as the head of . . . a real neo-fascist movement. . . . Is there going to be remnants of a neo-fascist movement that he leads in this country after this election? It’s a dangerous thing. We’re in a dangerous place.”
Trump was now a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, an ignoramus, a neo-fascist, and a sociopath, all rolled into one, clearly a menace and a threat to the future of the United States, if not humankind itself. But one thing was also for certain. It wasn’t going to happen in 2016. The media, like virtually everyone else on the left, were still utterly convinced Hillary had this one in the bag.
The Angry Aftermath: A “Moral 9/11”
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